THE SOUTH AS IT MUST BE
Carrying the past into the future
By Franklin Sanders

Today among the critics of the South the universal doctrine - the trump card of their reasoning, you might say -- is might makes right.  Outcome proves morality.  Impersonal cosmic justice rules, Hollywood teaches us, so goodness always wins in the end.  The South lost the war, so the South was evil.  End of Argument, Q.E.D.

Unfortunately for the validity of their argument, Pharisees and Sadduccees teach this, not Christians.  Christianity teaches that the providence of God is often inscrutable, and that presumption lurks in interpreting the will of God through events.  On the contrary, faith unremittingly labours in her duty to believe that ‘all things work together for good, to them that love God” in the teeth of events.

Let me tentatively offer a different interpretation of history.  Let me wonder if perhaps God loved the South too much to give her victory, so that instead he gave her something better:  himself.  Since these are all guesses anyway, and all guesses are equal, let me offer my guess that instead of abandoning the South to her own pride and self-sufficiency in victory, God married her to himself in the suffering of defeat.  He put her under the yoke and scourge of Revolution to cleanse her, to preserve her for another day, when the whole nation and the world would need his faithful people.  Let me speculate that to wear the despised title “The Bible Belt” is no shame, but only the glorious offence of the Cross. 

But even if these things are so, then they are no cause for pride in our own merits, but grounds to worship God for his unexcelled mercy, and a call to duty which grateful hearts must hear and obey.

Which brings us back to my earlier question,  how do we turn an upside down world back right side up? 

Or if we don’t yet have enough leverage to turn the whole world right side up, then how can we lead upright lives in an upside down world, until we can turn it right side up?

THE REVOLUTION WAS

The Old South did not call its secession a “revolution.” In the words of Jefferson Davis, the South left the Union ‘to save ourselves a revolution.”  Theologians like Thornwell and Dabney understood the Northern attack on the South broadly and more precisely as an attack on Christianity itself.

On the other hand, Northern radicals understood the war as a Revolution exactly in the sense of the French Revolution, a revolution to install  “natural human rights” and to overthrow the existing order.  As the war progressed the implacable bloodlust of the Revolution became harder and harder to deny or hide.

The Great Prevaricator, Abraham Lincoln, apparently feared unmasking himself when he made his first annual address to congress on December 3, 1861.  He said, “In considering the policy to be adopted for suppressing the insurrection, I have been anxious and careful that the inevitable conflict for this purpose shall not degenerate into a violent and remorseless revolutionary struggle.”  It’s too bad for the South he didn’t stick to his original carefulness. 

On the other hand, from the very outset the open radicals wanted to destroy the South, as James McPherson reports in his widely used textbook, Ordeal by Fire:  The Civil War and Reconstruction.

“Unlike Lincoln, abolitionists and radical Republicans did believe in a remorseless and revolutionary war.  An Abolitionist editor wanted the Civil War to become `the second glorious Second American Revolution’ to complete the unfinished business of the first -- `a National Abolition of Slavery.’  In an editorial on January 24, 1862, that must have chilled the hearts  of conservatives, the New York Tribune compared the crisis of the Union to the crisis of France during the Revolution of 1789.  Beset by internal factions and threatened by counterrevolution within and foreign intervention without, the French Republic survived only by exporting the revolution to all Europe.  `Like the French leaders of 1793,’ said the Tribune, `we must offer liberty and protection to the oppressed, and war to the oppressors.’  The most radical of the congressional Republicans, Thaddeus Stevens, was equally outspoken.  `Free every slave - slay every traitor - burn every Rebel mansion, if these things be necessary to preserve this temple of freedom,’ said Stevens.  We must `treat this [war] as a radical revolution, and remodel our institutions.’ [emphasis added]

Odd, by the way, isn’t it, that Stevens would refer to a “temple” of freedom.  Reminds you of the temple of Reason in the French revolution.  Almost sounds theological, doesn’t it?

The war quickly became a war of annihilation, a Vernichtungskrieg.  By 1864 General W.T. Sherman wrote to Maj. R.M. Sawyer, Assistant Adjutant General at Huntsville,

“The government of the United States has in North-Alabama any and all rights which they may choose to enforce in war, and to take their lives, their homes, their lands, their every thing .... Next year their lands will be taken; for in war we can take them, and rightfully, too; and in another year they may beg in vain for their lives. ...[T]o the petulant and persistent secessionist, why, death is [a] mercy, and the quicker he or she is disposed of, the better.”

This is not the place to digress into the North’s beastly and bloody prosecution of that Revolutionary War, including the crimes against the law of nations and the accepted conventions of war.  Nor should I mention the reign of terror which Lincoln unleashed against his domestic opponents, closing newspapers, suspending habeas corpus, and harassing and arresting at least 15,000 civilians.  Nor do I have time to outline even most briefly the destructive horrors of Reconstruction.  There is no need.  These are well known.

To identify  that Revolutionary aims and means of those who fomented the war is fairly easy.  What is more difficult to perceive and grasp is the Revolution’s alliance with its apparent enemy, Big Business. Although the Revolution professes an outward socialism, its most effective partner was then, and remains,  Big Business.  Indeed, the War virtually created Big Business and Big Banking. 

Larry Abraham explained that connection recently when he wrote, “From the time communism put down roots in Russia in 1917 [and I would say since the French revolution of 1789], right up until the present day, Western intellectuals have been consistent on only one thing concerning it.  They refuse to call it what it really is, a conspiracy for power.”  When we begin to understand the Revolution as a “conspiracy for power,” indeed, as the occult worship of power, then we can easily grasp how readily Big Business co-operates with, and co-opts, the Revolution.

This aspect of the revolution - that it destroys the values arising from the worship of the Trinity and replaces them with the worship of power and money  -- was not lost on Southerners after the war.  They saw Business and Government melding into one vast commercial tyranny.  The wise Episcopal bishop of Alabama, Richard H. Wilmer, could not be fooled.  In his 1887 book The Recent Past he wrote,

“[The love of money] is pre-eminently the root of present existing evil.  Now, whilst I am writing these lines, our people are in a craze.  The spirit of speculation has made some wise men mad.  Some will become rich; many more poor; the great mass of both rich and poor demoralised.  This speculative spirit not only runs counter to the Christian code, it is in the long-run disastrous in a prudential point of view.  The difference between legitimate, wholesome business and speculative trade is essentially this:  in the one, all are profited, -- the producer, the intermediary, and the consumer; in the other, the success of one is at the loss of his neighbour.  This state of things is not only irreligious, but unwholesome.  It is of the essence of gambling.”  (p. 136)

[Compare  Bishop Wilmer’s “gambling” with the recent tech stock bubble.]

In 1949 T.S. Eliot recognised this transformation.

“The real revolution in [the United States] was not what is called the Revolution, but is a consequence of the Civil War; after which arose a plutocratic elite; after which the expansion and material development of the country was accelerated; after which was swollen that stream of mixed immigration, bringing (or rather multiplying) the danger of development into a caste system which has not yet been quite dispelled.  For the sociologist, the evidence from America is not yet ripe.”

In our time the evidence, at least at the top levels, is now ripe, and in fact, a mite overripe.  The plutocratic elite announces its rule and its gospel without any embarrassment.

There was a disgusting piece in the April 30, 2001 Time magazine, “Ghosts of the South,” by a journalistic assassin named Steve Lopez.  Dismayed by the Mississippi flag fight, Lopez jiggled to and fro across the South to find solace for his troubled readers.  He interviewed Charles Wilson, director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi, who assured Lopez that the Bad Old South really wasn’t about to come back to life.  “The real  ideology of the contemporary South is economic development, not the Confederacy.” In other words, don’t talk to me about principles.  I only know money.

But Wilson was no quicker to toady to Mammon that Mississippi Governor Ronnie Musgrove, who helped foment the war on the Mississippi flag.  In conceding defeat, Musgrove opined that the election was over, so now it was time for the government to get back to its business, namely, guaranteeing prosperity to all the citizens of Mississippi.

For an alternative to the Musgrove version of civil government’s duty, see the Apostle Paul’s comments in Romans 13.  I doubt you’ll find “guaranteeing prosperity” in that list.

THE MOST PERFECT TYRANNY

We have today the most perfect tyranny every devised by mankind.  It has no concentration camps.  It doesn’t need them.  It creeps into every citizen’s heart through state education and every other organ capable of  influence, and then they enforce it on themselves voluntarily.  But why?

In the book of Common Prayer we pray in Family Morning Worship,

“Imprint upon our hearts such a dread of thy judgements, and such a grateful sense of thy goodness to us, as may make us both afraid and ashamed to offend thee.”

Now the rule of the Revolutionary messianic state and its present version of the KGB, political correctness, has arrived.  We must ask permission of their god the state before we do any otherwise lawful thing.  Why?  Because we have “such a dread of his judgements.”  We are afraid to speak out against the reigning shibboleths of political correctness.  We are ashamed  to offend them.  And the shame is ours, because we would rather offend God than offend them.

Am I correct?  Ask yourself how you would react if someone publicly called you a “racist” or a “male chauvinist.”  Ask yourself what would happen if you were “placed under investigation” by some government agency.  Where would your friends be then?

We live in fear and dread and shame -- of what?  The idols that rule us.  And those who do not obey them are punished, as you all know.  The Revolutionary faithful, and then the great mass of the people, will turn their backs on them so that those shunned can expect no help, never mind make a living.  It is a sort of secular excommunication.

Those who do obey are rewarded, with great prizes.  The tyrant doesn’t have to stand anyone up against the wall and shoot him, because without a word everyone understands and obeys.  The carrot attracts more pigs than the stick.

Antonio Gramsci was the Marxist who helped found the Italian Communist party.  He became a Marxist heretic after a visit to Soviet Russia in the early 1920s.  There he saw that Soviet communism remained an ideology alien to the people and imposed by force.  Existing Russian loyalties and values, he concluded, would never accept socialism.  Gramsci returned to Italy convinced that the road to socialist revolution led not through the Party’s political leadership, but through cultural leadership, “reshaping consciousness in society.”  Gramsci became a Marxist heretic by denying that economics determines culture, and asserting that culture determines economics and politics. 

Gramsci didn’t stop there.  If the culture were changed so as to make socialism acceptable, the revolution would occur naturally.  In fact, changing culture to the extent that everyone thought as a socialist and approved socialist “ideals” would be the revolution.  Socialism must replace Christianity as the source of all values. 

Yesterday’s heresy has become today’s Marxist orthodoxy.  You know it best in the persons of your recent president and his wife.

Today we live in the Gramscian paradise, where the Revolution has attained an influence so omnipotent, so unchallenged, so occult, that even its supposed opponents are oblivious to the Revolutionary incubus that rides their own brains and affections.

THE COUNTERREVOLUTION MUST BE

If this is the world turned upside down, how do we right it?  What is the South as it must be?  How do we carry the principles of the past into the future?

Reformation consists of works and worship.  

Nationally, the key to reformation must be to restore obedience to the Ten Commandments.  I don’t mean obedience only in our own lives, but in all Southern society.  I mean to restore civil government to obedience to God.  There is no other safety for us outside obedience to our God.

Personally, we must refuse the prizes, and risk the punishments, of the Revolution that rules us.

What are the prizes?  All those things that conform the worshipper to the image of the God he serves.

Every religionist hopes to be conformed to the God he serves.

·   If he worships Ba’al or the State, to power, with all its trappings.

·   If he worships Mammon, to money.

·   If he worships Venus, to sexual excess.

The prizes are all rewards, but at the same time all outwardly conform the worshipper to the image of his god.

If he worships the God of the Bible, then he wants to be conformed to Christ, in holiness and righteousness.  But how is that expressed?

·  In worship.  In the beauty of holiness

·  In justice to our fellow man, the heart of the law and outward righteousness.

Is worship really that important?  Hear what John Calvin says in his Commentary to Isaiah 63:18, where Isaiah writes, “Our adversaries have trodden down they sanctuary.” 

“This was a much heavier complaint, that wicked men had profaned the land which the Lord had consecrated to himself.  Undoubtedly this was far more distressing to the people than the rest of their calamities, and justly; for we ought not to care so much about ourselves as about religion and the worship of God.  And this is also the end of redemption, that there may be a people that praises the name of the Lord and worships him in a right manner.” 

Strong words from Calvin, that the whole end of our redemption is to worship God in a right manner.  This, then, is the proper work of reformation in our country and in our time, to restore the worship of God.

But how are we to turn this upside down country right side up?  How do we refuse their prizes?

I am not, for example, any more opposed to making money than the next man, and there is nothing unlawful about prosperity in itself.  But money is one of the most common prizes that the Revolution offers at large, and “the love of money is the root of all sorts of evil.”  Before we reach for the prize, we have to ask ourselves if it will cost our obedience to God -- if getting rich is worth losing our families and gaining an addiction to work. 

We not only have to refuse the prizes, we have to build up alternative institutions and alternative credentials.  By alternative I mean “independent of the reigning commercial system and its Revolutionary orthodoxy.”  We have to learn to reject the present credentials that attest to nothing more than a reliable orthodoxy to the Revolution.

Consider, for example, education.  Who will send his child to a Christian school, which does not have the system’s imprimatur of “accreditation”?  But how will that school receive “accreditation,” except by conforming itself to Revolutionary orthodoxy?  They beat you before you start.  You can only win by rejecting the prize of their accreditation and establishing your own accreditation, independent of and outside that orthodoxy.  Not only must you seek that alternative accreditation; you must also transfer your respect and allegiance from the old to the new.  You must support the new and boycott the old.

We have already seen statist education delegitimated. Heedless of the educrats’ puffing threats and warnings, parents by the million have relinquished all allegiance to the state education system and begun homeschooling their children.  Don’t bother telling me that creating new institutions is impossible.  The Great Dagon of them all, compulsory state education, has already been cut through at the knees.  It still stands not because of its strength, but because nobody has yet bothered to push it over on its face.

And it is not just in education, but in every field of man’s endeavour that we must delegitimate the old and enshrine the new, and everywhere that new must express the Gospel of Jesus Christ.

No institution needs reforming and restoring more than the Southern family.  No other institution promises such rich rewards.  If we continue to allow modern life to isolate our family members from each other, to permit the pace and prizes of modern society to atomise us, we must inevitably lose.  Where else will you raise up new soldiers for Christ?  Where else will you raise up rulers with the wisdom, courage, and vision to “bind their kings in chains”?

We need to raise up men who get angry.  Men like David who see contempt for the church and revolt against God and exclaim, “Who are these uncircumcised Philistines, that they should defy the armies of the Living God?”  We need men who will get angry, not with the murderous rage of the wicked, but with the zeal of Christ cleansing the temple.

I know that the anger of man does not accomplish the righteousness of God, but the law and the love of God does.  I am tired of people telling me that Christians don’t get angry.  What kind of man or woman allows his God to be blasphemed and flouted without getting angry?

“Be angry, and sin not.”  Be angry with righteous anger, zealous to see the God of heaven and earth worshipped and obeyed.  It is not the business of righteousness to stand still, silent, and idle in the face of wickedness.  It is not the job of righteousness to leave unchallenged the rule of the wicked.  More than three decades ago the Reverend T. Robert Ingram, Rector of St. Thomas’ Episcopal Church in Houston, Texas, wrote these words:

“Christians are responsible for enforcing God’s law as well as for obeying it.  The first charge to be levelled against the ungodly at the last judgement, according to Psalm 50, is not that they committed crimes, but `Thou sawest a thief and consentedst unto him.’  You saw a crime committed and turned your back.  That is why law and order is so swiftly being overturned by the revolutionaries among us; because Christian men and women lack the courage and the insight to enforce God’s laws.  The burden falls on each and every citizen.  The system provides its own safeguards.  The issue brings into focus the real object of hatred and attack, none other than the Lord Jesus Christ.”

Don’t expect the help of your elite, social or business.  They betrayed you long ago.  They have changed their gods.  They abandoned Jehovah for Mammon and Ba’al, and they now have a nest full of prizes to protect.  They won’t help you.  They will betray you again.

So whatever you accomplish for the Gospel - for the restoration of Christian civilisation in the South -- you will accomplish in the teeth of their scorn and contempt.  That is the offence of the cross, that even the apostles could not overcome until they saw the Risen Saviour with their own eyes and the Holy Spirit came to them.

Your job is to change men’s hearts by the Gospel.  A virtuous government can survive only among a virtuous people.  They will have no other. But a virtuous government among a wicked and idolatrous people is like a ring of gold in a swine’s snout.  It ill suits them and they will soon overthrow it.

Institutions, constitutions, confessions, and loyalty oaths are never enough to keep a system.  Hearts must be kept, then the system will keep itself.

Not even the Word of God itself is enough, because God blinds the wicked to it, as an act of judgement.  The disciples ask Christ why he speaks in parables.  In Mark 4:11 & 12 he quotes the Prophet Isaiah:

And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables:  That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.

The Holy Spirit must teach, bringing  to life the seed of the Word in men’s hearts or else it will die by the roadside.  As Calvin says, “Words [are] but vain, unless the fear of God reign in their hearts, which may receive them, and receiving them, may foster them.”

But our dependence on the Spirit of God is no reason to despair, or to relent.  We may not know how the Spirit works or when, but we certainly do know he will not bring to life a seed we have never sown!  You are God’s sowers, that go forth even with weeping, keeping before you the joy of God’s promised harvest:   the harvest of which Christ himself is the first fruits, the harvest that contains the vision of a nation, and a world, where our children live under his rule.

Men and brethren, we are now held in a prison, but it is a prison of our own dread, of our own shame.  When the Pharisees threw the apostles into prison, the Fifth chapter of the Book of Acts reports that God sent an angel to open the prison door at night, who told them to go back into the temple and speak “all the words of this life.”  Calvin comments,

 [L]et us be aware that God will increase his Church with spiritual good things, even though he allows the wicked to vex her.  Therefore we must always be ready for combat; because our condition today does not differ from theirs. ...

The Lord brought the apostles out of prison, not because he would free them completely from the hands of their enemies.  Indeed, afterwards he allowed them to be brought back again and beaten with rods.  Rather by this miracle he meant to declare that they were in his hand and under his protection, so that he might maintain the credit of the gospel, partly to confirm the Church again, partly to leave the wicked without excuse.  Wherefore we must not always hope, nay, we must not always desire that God will deliver us from death.  Rather, we must be content with this one thing:  that his hand defends our life, as far as it is expedient. ...

What is the end of their deliverance?  That they employ themselves in preaching the gospel stoutly, and provoke their enemies courageously, until they die valiantly.  For at length they were put to death when the hand of God ceased, but only after they had finished their course.  Now, however, the Lord opens the prison for them, so that they may be free to fulfil their function. 

That is worth our marking, because we see many men who, once they have escaped out of persecution, afterwards keep silence, as if they had done their duty towards God and were no more to be troubled.  Others, also, escape by denying Christ.  But the Lord delivers his children, not to the end that they may cease from running the course they have begun, but rather that they may more zealously run it afterward.  The apostles might have objected, “It is better to keep quiet for a while, since every word we speak brings us into danger.  If they arrest us now for only one sermon, how much more will we inflame our enemies’ fury when they see us speak without ceasing?”

But because they knew that they were to live and to die to the Lord, they do not refuse to do what the Lord commanded.  So we must always mark what function the Lord enjoins on us.  Many things will meet us which will discourage us unless we content ourselves with the commandment of God alone and do our duty, committing the success to him.

God save the South!

-- First delivered in Monroe, Louisiana on May 24, 2001 at the Southern Heritage Conference.